Laurie Cass - Bookmobile Cat 02 - Tailing a Tabby

Chapter 8

“Who’s going for lunch today?” Donna asked late the next morning.

“I went last week,” Kelsey said.

“Pretty sure I went the week before.” Josh kept his hands in his pockets, dodging the list that Donna was trying to pass to him.

Over the last couple of months, the library staff had fallen into the habit of ordering Wednesday lunch from the Round Table. Whoever happened to be at the main desk took orders, and the fetching task rotated among everyone else.

I was pretty sure that Josh had no idea about the last time he’d walked down for the orders, but I was very sure that the topic wasn’t worth pursuing. “I’ll go. It’s a beautiful day.”

Donna grinned and handed me the paper. “It’s all yours, toots.”

Toots? I looked down at the lengthy list. “All right, who’s ordering onion rings? You know how Stephen hates the smell of onions in the library.” I kept reading the list. “Four orders of onion rings? Are you kidding me?” I looked up, but they had already scattered.

“Weenies,” I called. “You’re all a bunch of weenies.” Laughter came back to me and I shook my head, smiling. They were weenies, but I didn’t know what I’d do without them.

I headed out into the warmth of a July day. In the not so far distance, Janay Lake was dotted by sailboats and powerboats with long tails of white-edged wake. Here in town, cars lined every street within three blocks of downtown. Ah, summer.

As I walked, I played the license plate game. Mostly Michigan plates, of course, but once I got to the main drag I hit the mother lode. An Ohio plate. New York. Missouri. California. Wisconsin. Colorado. And two Illinois for a total of eight out-of-state plates in a five-minute walk. A new record for Minnie!

I walked into the Round Table. Since it was summer and it was lunchtime, the place was packed with people I didn’t recognize. Instead of the familiar faces I saw September through May, I saw sun-kissed cheeks and windblown hair and felt the infectious high spirits that people get when they’re on vacation and having a good time.

“You’re here for the library’s order, right?” the young woman at the cash register asked. “It’ll be up in just a couple minutes. You want to pay now?”

I handed over the bills that Donna had given me along with the list and smirked a little on the inside. “Keep the change.” It would serve them right for the onion rings.

“Hello, Ms. Hamilton.”

Behind me were Detectives Devereaux and Inwood, the two police officers I’d dealt with a few weeks ago. Though we’d started off on the wrong foot, and then found that the other foot was also wrong, we’d ended up… well, perhaps not actually liking each other, but with grounds for mutual respect.

I nodded at the men. Both were in their late fifties; both had graying hair and tired looks. Then the similarities ended. I’d had trouble remembering which detective was which until a smart young deputy had told me about the letters. Detective Inwood was tall and thin, like the letter I. Detective Devereaux was shorter and rounder, exactly like a D, making him the embodiment of a D word.

“Detectives.” D words, everywhere you looked. “How are you this fine day?”

Inwood grunted noncommittally. “So, how long have you known Russell McCade?”

“I know Barb a lot better.” Which was true and didn’t exactly answer his question, but I was okay with that.

“So you’ve known the McCades for some time?”

I put my chin up in the air, the better to stare him straight in the eye with. “Is this an official questioning?” I asked. “Because as I recall, Mr. McCade was released the other night. Seems to me that Daniel Markakis wouldn’t take kindly to this line of questioning, not after what the medical examiner’s report showed.”

Detective Devereaux chuckled. Inwood sighed. “Ms. Hamilton, we’re doing our job. All avenues have to be explored.”

“Seems to me this one’s a dead end,” I said. It came out a little snappy, but these two had a gift for bringing out the snark in me. “There must be other streets to go down.” I smiled, trying to be jovial. “Lanes, even. Alleys. Courts. Roads.”

“Or drives,” said a male voice. “Don’t forget drives.”

The three of us turned. Deputy Ash Wolverson stood a few feet away, looking from the detectives to me and back. Too late, he’d sensed the mild tension fizzing in the air. “Uh, Detectives. Ms. Hamilton, right? With the bookmobile.”

I nodded. “Deputy.” He was at least two decades younger than the detectives, making him maybe a few years older than me. He was also what many women would have called hot, with his muscular build, square jaw, and short brown hair. Right now, however, I would have called him uncomfortable. Which amused me on many levels.

“The library’s order is up.” The girl at the register hefted two large white plastic bags. Deputy Wolverson made a move to pick them up, but Detective Inwood blocked him and did the honors.

“Ms. Hamilton,” he said, handing me the bags. “We’re doing all we can to find Ms. Radle’s killer. It’s unfortunate if this offends your friends, but that’s what police work can be like.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I know. I don’t suppose you can tell me if any of those other avenues are looking productive?”

“Inquiries are proceeding,” Detective Devereaux said.

So, no, they couldn’t tell me. I nodded and headed out but had to wait for a large family group to come in before I could get outside. While I waited, I craned my neck around to see the back corner. Bill D’Arcy, a new Chilson resident, was sitting in his normal spot, reading away on his computer, as per usual.

Sabrina, the diner’s forever waitress, filled his coffee mug and leaned over to kiss the top of his head. As she did, the sparkle of her new engagement ring caught the light and flashed back to me, bright and shiny.

I grinned. Every once in a while, things really did work out.

• • •

Halfway back to the library, I stopped, put the bags of food on a bench, and dug my phone out of my purse. Seeing Sabrina and Bill’s happiness made me want to talk to Tucker. And though Tucker had, in fact, called me as he’d promised, I’d been at the library with my phone turned off. Since then, we’d carried on a serious game of phone tag and it was getting a little silly.

I stared at my phone. Maybe a call wasn’t the best idea. Maybe a text would be better. I squinted my brains into gear and thumbed out a message. Miss you. When can we get together?

The phone was in my purse and the bags were in my hands when I heard the ping of an incoming text message.

Down went the bags. I got out the phone and peered at the screen.

Me not Rafe?

I sat. What on earth was he talking about? So I typed that out. What are you talking about?

After a short but endless wait, he texted back. Batteries in bedroom?

“Oh…” Suddenly all was clear. When Tucker had stopped by the boat, Rafe had needed a new battery for his volt-doohickey. The only reason Rafe knew where things lived in my bedroom was that every spring he helped me open up my houseboat and get it in the water in exchange for my helping him with his spring yard work. But Tucker didn’t know that. Tucker must have thought… I wanted to gag. Rafe was a good friend, but if we ever spent more than a single uninterrupted hour together, one on one, I’d have to muzzle him.

My thumbs got busy. I sent Tucker a long message about the spring chores. Before I hit the SEND button, I added the part about the muzzle.

Less than a minute later came a new message from Tucker.

Okay. Sorry I freaked out.

Right after that came a longer message that included his work schedule for the next couple of weeks, ending with How about you?

My schedule, naturally, was almost the complete opposite of his, but I did have a Saturday off in the not too distant future that matched up. I pointed that out, and he sent back a text. We’ll do something fun.

A happy feeling filled me, lifting me, and making me grin like a kid on Christmas morning. I texted him back. Count on it.

• • •

At noon the next day, I headed off to do something I’d never thought I’d do—I drove onto the premises of Talcott Motors, the place Carissa’s obituary had said she worked.

Sleek, shiny cars were placed just so on the grassy area between the road and the parking lot, cars that even car-challenged me knew were outrageously expensive. Cars from Germany, Italy, France, Scandinavia—and those were the ones I could identify.

I parked my sedan, which looked like something a teenager of the hired help would drive, and walked into the showroom.

Car doors were invitingly open, hoods were propped up, and that new car scent was everywhere. Even though I knew I was being manipulated, I couldn’t help walking up close to a sports car that looked fast even when it was standing still. “Wonder if Eddie would like this,” I murmured.

“Eddie’s your husband?” A middle-aged man, as smooth as the car against which he was leaning, smiled at me. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?” He stepped toward me, one hand held forward for shaking, the other holding out a business card. “Bob Slocum, assistant manager of sales, at your service.”

I shook his hand and took his card. “Hi, Minnie Hamilton, assistant director of the Chilson District Library.”

His eyes, which had lit up upon hearing my title, dulled down at the mention of the library. The man clearly had a good idea of my salary. “Looking for a summer car?” he asked. “This is a top seller for us. Clients tell us that driving it is more fun than anyone should be allowed to have.” He waved me toward the driver’s door. “Take a seat, see what it feels like.”

I put my hands behind my back and edged away. “Actually I’m looking for someone.” Who exactly, I didn’t know, but surely the line I’d prepared would work. “A friend of Carissa Radle’s.”

His gaze flicked briefly toward the row of offices lining the showroom’s far wall. “Minnie, I’d love to help, but I hear my phone ringing. If you’ll excuse me.” He strode off, entered an office, and shut the door. Through the glass that made up the row’s outside wall, I watched him lean back in his chair and pick up a magazine.

I mentally shrugged at the casual rejection—he was so good at it his coworkers probably called him Brush-off Bob—and walked toward the small office at which he’d glanced. It was occupied by a woman in her late thirties. Her sandy brown hair was cut short and stuck out into cute multiple spikes. I approached her open door, read her nameplate—Jari Mayes—and knocked on the doorjamb.

She looked up from the papers piled high on her desk. “Hi. If you’re looking for a salesguy, they’re down that way.” She jerked her head. “If you have a bookkeeping question, though, you’ve come to the right place.” Her smile was friendly, but her attention was clearly on the papers.

I introduced myself and said, “Could I talk to you a minute?”

“Uh, sure. What can I do for you?”

“It’s about Carissa Radle,” I said.

“About…” She swallowed and put her hand to her mouth, showing fingernails that were ragged from chewing. “. . . Carissa?” She blinked, once, twice; then the tears spilled over and down her cheeks.

• • •

After the tears that had overwhelmed Jari abated, I suggested that we head for lunch at the Three Seasons, my treat. Jari had sniffled, blown her nose, and agreed.

Once we were settled into a quiet corner, I’d spun Jari a story about being a friend of a friend who’d known the dead woman, that said friend was so troubled by Carissa’s death that sleep was becoming impossible, and that I’d promised I’d try to find someone who could answer some questions about Carissa, that maybe this would help the friend sleep at night.

None of which made much sense if you thought about it for any length of time, but I was finding out that if you spoke well and sincerely, people tended to believe what you told them.

“So you and Carissa had known each other for a while?” I asked.

Jari sipped her water. “She started doing sales at Talcott, oh, around three years ago, I guess. I’ve been there since I graduated high school.” She took another, deeper sip. “Probably be there until I die,” she muttered.

Our server approached, carrying a platter laden with Kristen-directed food offerings. “Here you are, ladies,” he said. “We’re starting you off with Waldorf salads and rolls fresh from the oven.”

I pushed the bowl of rolls over to Jari’s side. “Have you had these before? Melt-in-your-mouth good.”

She reached for her knife. “Oh, I shouldn’t,” she said, taking a roll and buttering it. As she took her first bite, her eyes closed and she gave a slight moan. “Oh, wow, this is so good.”

Exactly. “You and Carissa were good friends?”

Jari dabbed at the corner of her buttery mouth with a white cloth napkin. “We ended up as friends the first week she started at the dealership.” She looked at the roll in her hand as if she had no idea how it had gotten there. “Carissa was so much fun. One of those happy people, you know? It’s just so wrong that she’s dead.” Her lower lip started to crumple.

I waited a short moment, then said, “Don’t let your food get cold. I know for a fact the owner hates it when that happens.” This was true. In the privacy of her office, Kristen had been known to stomp and rave at the top of her lungs about good food gone to waste. My hope, however, was that the eating and drinking process would keep Jari talking. My library friend Holly always talked when she held a beverage of any kind. I wondered briefly if her young children were aware of that quirk, and decided it was up to them to figure it out on their own.

“You know the owner?” Jari took another bite, then swallowed. “That’s pretty cool.”

It was, but I wanted to talk about her friend, not mine. “What did Carissa like to do? Did she have a boyfriend? Did she ski or have a boat or anything like that?”

“Ski?” Jari smiled. “The only place Carissa would have been at a ski resort was in the bar. You know, I bet she would have made a great bartender.” Her pensive look was back.

I took a roll and pushed the bowl back in her direction. “No boyfriend?”

Jari’s hand crept forward, hesitated, then snatched another roll. “She’d had a bad breakup just before she started at Talcott. She said she’d sworn off men her own age, that she was going to try dating older men and see if she had better luck.”

Could this be… a clue? “So, was she? Dating an older man, I mean?”

Jari shook her head. “I’m not sure. When I was on vacation back in June, some guy came into the dealership. She said they went out a couple of times, but I’m not sure it was anything serious.”

“What was his name?”

Jari kept buttering her roll. “She never said.”

My eyebrows went up, and Jari sighed. “Yeah, I know. I thought it was weird, too. I mean, you always tell your girlfriends the name of the guy you’re dating. Always, unless…”

She stopped talking, so I filled in the blank. “You think he was married?”

“I don’t know.” Unhappiness crowded onto her face. “I can’t think that Carissa would date a married man. That just wasn’t like her.”

I hoped not. “What did she say about him?”

“Not much. Only that he was kind of loaded, moneywise, and that he didn’t look anything like the last guys she’d dated.” Jari gave a vague smile. “She said it was time to break out of the lean build and sandy brown hair rut she’d fallen into.”

So I had a wealthy older man as a suspect, one who was potentially married. Plus the bad-breakup guy. “Who was the guy she broke up with?”

“You mean the Weasel?”

I laughed. “Please tell me that isn’t really his name.”

“That’s what she always called him.” Jari gave a wan smile. “I never knew what his name was.”

Our waiter scooped away the empty dishes and promised that our stuffed whitefish sandwiches would be out soon. I waited until he’d gone to ask the Big Question. “Do you have any idea who could have killed her?”

Jari clutched her water glass. “I wish I did. If I knew who did that to her, I’d go to the police so fast my head would spin around in circles.”

“Do you know if anyone hated her? Or”—a brilliant idea came to me—“was really jealous of her?”

“She wasn’t like that. I mean, she was pretty, so I suppose some wacko could have been jealous, but she was just fun. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to… wanting to…” She sighed and took another roll.

I couldn’t imagine it, either, and I hadn’t even known the woman. Sorrow leached into and through me, another death diminishing me. What we needed was something for undiminishing purposes. A brand-new baby might work, although preferably not right here in the restaurant.

“There is one thing, though.” Jari pleated her napkin. “She was big on Facebook. Always posting on there, real personal stuff. I kept telling her that she was opening herself up to trouble. I told her over and over that her house was going to be robbed, what with her posting where she was all the time and what she was doing and who she was doing it with. But she just told me not to be such a worrywart and laughed it off.”

Jari’s voice shook. “She said she was careful about her privacy controls and who she friended. She was all fun and games and she hardly ever took anything seriously. I wish… I wish I could be more like her.”

I reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “That’s a lovely thing to say and I’m sure that somewhere, somehow, Carissa is smiling down at you.”

Jari swallowed a sob. “Do you think so?”

I did. But I also wondered if Carissa’s Facebook page was still online.

• • •

That night the dinner menu was takeout Thai (me) and cat food (Eddie). A stiff breeze had whipped up out of the northwest and eating outside would have meant chasing napkins and keeping hair out of my mouth, so we were eating inside for the first time in days. Eddie had settled onto the top of the opposite dining bench and was studiously not paying attention to me.

“I’m sorry it’s not nice enough to eat outside,” I told him, “but you don’t like the wind. You know you don’t.”

His mouth opened and closed in a soundless “Mrr.”

I ignored him and turned the page of the book I was trying to read. It was the latest release from James Lee Burke, something I’d been looking forward to reading for weeks, but even Mr. Burke’s lyrical prose wasn’t capturing my attention.

I closed the cover. I probably shouldn’t be reading a library book while eating something as slurpy as pad Thai, anyway. If I sprayed even the slightest spot of sauce on a page, I’d feel obligated to buy the book and my monthly book budget had taken a serious hit during the library’s Fourth of July book sale. Two dollars a hardcover and a dollar a paperback are sweet prices to a bibliophile, but spend a couple of hours wandering the tables and you can still fork out a serious amount of money, no problem.

With no book at hand, I had two options. Read the newspaper or talk to Eddie. Since getting the newspaper meant I’d have to stand up, walk all the way across the room, bend down to get it out of my backpack, stand up, and walk all the way back again, I opted for Eddie.

“Not that you’re second choice,” I told him.

He turned his head and stared at me without blinking. I couldn’t tell if he was thinking about how best to punish me for being a liar or if he was wondering how my food would taste if I keeled over dead.

“You wouldn’t like tofu,” I said. “Shrimp, sure, but I didn’t order that today.”

He went back to looking out into the windy world and I went back to talking to a cat that couldn’t understand a word I said. Well, ninety-eight out of a hundred words. I was pretty sure he knew his name and what “No!” meant even if he didn’t change whatever behavior was causing the command.

“So I need to find out more about Carissa Radle.” I wound rice noodles around my fork, saw that it was far too big a bite, and shoveled it in anyway. Living alone allows you to do things like that. The trick is to remember to stop doing them when people are watching.

I chewed and swallowed. I might take big bites in the privacy of my own houseboat, but at least I didn’t talk with my mouth full. A girl has to have standards.

Eddie stood and leaned backward to stretch his front legs.

“Stay out of my pad Thai,” I warned him, but he didn’t even glance at my food. Instead he jumped onto the floor and soft-footed it over to his water dish, where he crouched on the far side of the bowl and leaned all the way across it to drink.

I lived with the weirdest cat on the planet. Life was good. “So, Weird One, what should I do next about Carissa? How do I find out more about her?”

Eddie glanced up at me, a large drop of water hanging off his chin.

“Nice look.” I spiraled up another mouthful of noodles. “Most times I’d ask Rafe or Kristen.” Local knowledge had leached into their bones at birth. As a newcomer to Chilson, I was operating at a decided disadvantage. “But Carissa wasn’t from here, so that network isn’t going to be very useful.”

Okay, so what would be useful? Talking to relatives. Friends. Neighbors. The only thing was, Carissa hadn’t been up north long, and—

“Mrr.”

I turned around. In the thirty seconds I’d had my back to Mr. Ed, he’d flopped on my backpack, wormed his back end inside, and burrowed around to make himself comfortable. In doing so he skidded my cell phone onto the floor.

“You are a cat of many talents.” I crossed the kitchen to pick up the phone. “You even managed to turn it on to the calendar screen. How’d you do that?”

Once again, he didn’t answer, but this time it was because he was sound asleep, deep into my backpack, the only part of him visible a pinkish nose.

Weirdest cat ever. No doubt about it.